CRISES crackled through the airwaves this week. The French journalist Agnès Poirier, whose book on Notre-Dame is subtitled The soul of France, explored the cathedral’s post-fire restoration through the makers of beams, bells, and gargoyles. The colossal scale of the “adventure” came across in Poirier’s travels to workshops in Aquitaine, Normandy, and the Loire Valley, and in international interviewees in In the Studio: The rebuilding of Notre-Dame de Paris (BBC World Service, Tuesday of last week).
The New York carpenter Jackson Dubois’s ancestors came to the United States as Huguenot refugees. In France, he is crafting the trenails and wooden pegs supporting platforms for saints’ statues beneath the spire of Notre-Dame. On the transformation from tree to crafted object, Dubois says: “Going from the peak of the natural world to the celebration of humanity in form is endlessly surprising and gratifying.”
In Normandy, Paul Bergamo, a bell-foundry manager, spoke of Notre-Dame’s eight bells as family, returning for restoration after the April 2019 fire, having been recast in 2013. “When you have worked for Notre-Dame, even once, you feel a visceral attachment.” Declaring Anne-Geneviève his favourite bell — out of Gabriel, Denis, Étienne, Benoît-Joseph, Marcel, Maurice, and Jean-Marie — Bergamo explained that her sound was “a bit above the others in terms of quality”. After recasting, a bell’s tone can be retuned lower, but not higher.
Beginning with a description of the night flames that engulfed Notre-Dame, and the pledging of $1 billion to restore it, Poirier ended with an aerial view of the construction site, and the city of mobile “boxes” supporting workers raising the phoenix from the flames.
Within two days of release, The Rest Is Classified, from the Goldhanger company, was Apple’s number-one podcast, with 200,000 downloads in five days. The narration by the former CIA analyst David McCloskey and the veteran BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera of the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan after 9/11, in CIA vs the Taliban (podcast, Wednesday of last week), make this popularity understandable. The duo have the breezy conversational style that only copious research and rigorous scripting produces.
All their interruptions and narrative side roads drove the story arc of a small group of CIA operatives’ encouraging the Uzbek “horselord” Abdul Rashid Dostum to fight the Taliban. “America was the insurgent,” Mr McCloskey says of the agents with gear from Washington, DC, camping shops — to be inconspicuous — and $3 million, in non-sequential $100 bills, in duffel bags. Apart from Dostum’s visit to a shrine in retaken Mazar-i-Sharif, “for show”, religion or morals are never raised. Can’t let things like that slow down a good story.
In The Bottom Line: Decisions that made me, (Radio 4, Thursday of last week), Elmarie Marais, the founder of the organisation GoCrisis, recalled her former employer’s sole moral support for Asian-tsunami work: asking what size wellies she needed for morgue visits. Marais started her own company to offer crisis workers more.